APCMs and all that...

For most of my time as an ordained person in the Church of England I have been what is these days described as an Associate Minister. After leaving my career in the law I was ordained Deacon in 1996 and served as a curate in Felsted and Little Dunmow for two years, being ordained priest in 1997. I then came to Stanway to serve as an Associate (or Assistant as it was then sometimes called) and that was my job title for the following 14 years or so, (that was my licence in the benefice of Greensted with St. Anne in Colchester for example). The reason for this was essentially that, although I was ordained, my principal job was looking after home and family while my wife, Morag, went out to work. You do not need me to tell you that bringing up three children is a full-time occupation! In short, I did not have the time to be a vicar.

It was only in 2014 that I became an incumbent. That is to say the principal or senior ordained person in a parish – the Rector/Vicar or, in my case here in Stanway, the Priest in Charge.  The change in family circumstances (children growing up mainly) meant that I had more time at my disposal and so could take on more responsibilities. It was only then that I encountered the full force of church administration and church law, and it was a bit of a shock. I had taken many weddings over the years but never had a hand in all the necessary legal preliminaries – and there are quite a few. I had never had the responsibility of  maintaining church records or supervising the maintenance of the fabric of a church building, I had never looked after a churchyard or granted a faculty for a headstone, and I had never had to organise an APCM. For those of you who may not know this stands for Annual Parochial Church Meeting and it is a very important event. It is at the APCM that everyone on the church electoral roll has an opportunity to ask questions of the incumbent and PCC about what they have been doing in the past year. Reports are prepared and officers in the church (wardens and PCC members mainly) are elected, rather like a company annual meeting. It requires a good deal of care and preparation and I am fortunate in that there are two excellent churchwardens and other PCC members to assist, advise and guide me. This year’s APCM for St. Albright is coming up this Sunday.

There are plenty of clergy who find all the admin. very tedious and a bit of a waste of time. I have to say that I have been known to drift in that direction too. This is not surprising bearing in mind that people who come to ordained ministry want to be ministers – involved in pastoral care, preaching, teaching, and proclaiming the gospel to name but a few tasks. Attending meetings does not always seem to fall into any of those categories.

However, there are good reasons why these things are important.

• Any institution or organisation, the Church of England no less than any other, needs to have rules and principles – ways of doing things which are clear and capable of being understood so that it can function properly. Sometimes they may seem complex, even arcane, and that is often largely due to the long history and development of the church in this country, but they are necessary.
• We live and work in the real world with all its challenges, difficulties and evils. We counter these by prayerful action but that needs planning and organisation. God is a God of order, not chaos, so it is vital to have appropriate systems in place. Of course these need to be reviewed regularly with loving scrutiny and a readiness to change and adapt.
• We need to remember that Jesus himself came into this world with all its muddle and imperfection. God did not despise our fallen-ness or stand aloof from us – he got involved, he got stuck in and he worked with how things were in his time. We may not like how things are, indeed we must strive for change in our very needy world, but we begin with what we have got.
• Perhaps most important of all we should not let the admin or our rules dictate to us too much. They are there to help and to guide, to make the business of being church easier and better. With these things in place we are freed up to do what we are meant to do in this world – to be proclaimers and witnesses of Jesus Christ (see Luke 24. 47-48).   

I do not suppose that I will ever like all the admin that I do or relish every single meeting, but I will try to keep it all in perspective: to see that they are a necessary means to an end and that I should not get too carried away/upset/annoyed. After all, “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord” (Romans 8.28).

Come to think of it, APCMs are not all that bad.